Arrows of the Sun (9 page)

Sidani moved forward into the light of the vigil-lamp,
almost as if she had forgotten that she entered a temple. Her face was still a
shadow, but her eyes were bright, fixed on Vanyi’s face. “For once I don’t
appall you. Do you agree with me, then?”

“You know I don’t.”

Sidani looked down at her feet on the fine colored pavement,
and up past Vanyi to the altar with its undying light. Her hand rose to her
throat. Something, some trick of the lamplight, caught the thickening of scars.
Old galls.

Slave’s collar? There were no slaves under the sway of the
Sun.

Vanyi touched her torque. No slaves. But priests enough, and
the torque a cruel weight, rubbing raw the necks of those who bore it.

“Yes,” said the wanderer. “I was a priestess of the Sun. No
one else has seen, do you know that? Least of all your great one, your holy
one, your mage and priest and master. He’s blind to aught but light.”

“You ran away,” Vanyi said.

Sidani laughed, harsh as a gorecrow’s cry. “Ran, and was not
driven? Can you be so sure of that?”

“You’re not one to do anything but what you choose for
yourself.”

“That’s a flaw in me,” Sidani said. “Yes, I ran. I flung my
torque on the altar, cursed the day I took it, and declared myself dead and
damned. They wouldn’t help me, you see. They wouldn’t lend me their power when
my beloved was dying.”

Vanyi shivered. “They can be cold, the Sun’s priests.
They’ll do nothing for one the god has touched.”

“So they said of him. But they always hated him. He wouldn’t
believe in them, you see, or bow to the god. Not even in the end, when the
Light was in his face.” Her own was stark, racked with memory. “Oh, he was a
cold, cruel, godless, heartless monster of a man, and I loved him with all that
I was. He was the half of me. But for him, I would never have been.”

“Chubadai?”

Sidani’s lips stretched back from her teeth. “That fat
pirate? He never laid a hand on me. He knew I’d take it off if he tried.”

“He died, your lover. And so you turned apostate.” The words
were cold on Vanyi’s tongue, with a tang of bitterness. “I . . .
don’t know that I could do as much.”

“Why should you? He’ll live long, your lissome lad, if an
assassin doesn’t get him first. My beauty was born to die young. He didn’t age
too terribly before he went—that much grace the god gave him. He just. . .
went. One moment all there for me, and a good hot quarrel we had going, too.
The next, empty: drowned in light.”

“You fought on his deathbed?”

Sidani smiled. “It was splendid. He insisting to his last
breath that there were no gods, and all the proof in front of him, and I ready
to strangle him if I didn’t kiss him to death first. It took him just then,
like lightning from the core of him: seized him and consumed him. No long slow
withering into dotage for my lord. He went up like a torch.” Her smile died.
“That was glorious. But the priests who refused to give him life when he took
sick—them, I never forgave. Nor ever shall.”

“I should rebuke you,” Vanyi said, “if I were a proper
priestess.”

“You’re proper enough.” Sidani strode to the altar with the
air of one who dares her greatest fear, and turned her face upward to the lamp
that hung above it. “There,” she said. “There, god and father. See what I think
of you. Will you strike me now? You dragged out my life for years past counting,
half a mind that I was, half a spirit, half a soul. Take me, damn you. Put an
end to this endlessness.”

Her grief was like a wind in that holy place, bleak and
cold. It was older than Vanyi, and stronger, with power in it beyond magery. It
left her empty of thought or will.

Perilous
. Some
small part of her knew it, fought it. The rest fell before it.

o0o

Pain. Her cheek stung. She looked into a face she knew and
did not know, black eagle-face, eyes—

“Your eyes are wrong,” she said.

They blinked. Sidani drew back. Both of them were on the
floor, Vanyi lying, she kneeling, sitting on her heels.

Her eyes were perfectly ordinary northern eyes, if sharper
than most. Why Vanyi had wanted them to be yellow, she could not think.
Fuddlement, no more. They all looked alike, these northerners, with their faces
like birds of prey.

For the first time in a long while, she yearned for a face
that was like her own. Brown, maybe, with wind and weather, but white under it,
and eyes sea-colored, and hair neither straight nor curling but something of
both. Sharp-chinned, long-nosed, Island-bred, and no great waveless shield of
land between herself and it.

Her fingers clutched at unyielding floor. Her stomach
heaved. Laughter choked her. All these days, months, years, and now of all
times she succumbed to the land-sickness.

No wonder people said they wanted to die. It racked her:
knotted her stomach, cramped her belly, doubled her up gasping.

A thin strong hand stroked her hair back from her sweating
face. Arms lifted her. A voice spoke, cursing softly and with great
inventiveness.

“Not,” said Vanyi. “Not your fault.”

“Only about half of it.” Sidani held her as she struggled,
with ease that froze her into stillness. “Stop that. This place is too strong
for you, with what I woke in it. I’m taking you where you’ll be safer.”

“Don’t need—don’t want—”

Little good that did. Vanyi was going to be properly and
catastrophically sick, and soon. She hoped she would not do it all over
Sidani’s coat.

These new eyes above her were as they should be, bright gold
with astonishment in the dark face, and the temper that flared in it was oddly
comforting. Arms somewhat stronger and much more welcome closed about her.
Anger trembled in them. “What’s wrong with her? What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” Vanyi said before Sidani could begin. “The sea.
It’s too far. My blood—my tides—”

They were flowing out of her. Relentless, as if the moons
had set hooks in her belly and torn it apart. As if—

“No!”

Her courses were strong. They always had been. But this was
stronger than anything she had known. There was more in it than the tide of the
moons, more in her womb than vows and emptiness.

The bindings had failed. They had made a child together, she
and Estarion—neither of them suspecting, neither of them dreaming that it could
be possible. And it died, this son, this daughter, it did not matter. The
bindings, waking too late, closed in upon it. They killed it. Nothing that she
did could stop it.

o0o

“What did you do to her?”

Estarion was much quieter this time. The anger was beaten
out of him.

Neither of them had moved to fetch help. Sidani knew what to
do: her hands were deft, catching the flood when it came, stanching it with
cloths that she drew it seemed from air. One of them did not move as well as
the other, he noticed with remote and bitter clarity. It was twisted somewhat,
and its palm was scarred as if she had held it in a fire.

Odd that he had not noticed before. Odd that he noticed now,
or cared, when nothing should matter but Vanyi’s life.

“I think,” the woman said when Vanyi was quiet, more asleep
than unconscious, “that you had somewhat more to do with this than I. Has she
miscarried before?”

The word rang in his brain. “Mis—” He tossed his head. It
would not come clear. “She can’t! She’s womb-bound. Spelled. She can’t—”

“You forget what you are,” Sidani said. “Did no one teach
you to hold your seed until you were ready to beget your heir?”

He recoiled. “That’s barbaric!”

Her laughter was weary beyond telling. Something in it
struck him nearly to tears. “So. That much of Asanion is yours. Did your mother
know what she was permitting? Or did she care?”

He could not think of that. Of what it would mean. That his
mother knew, and had not prevented it.

“The goddess is a milder thing than she was when I was
young,” Sidani said, still in that tired voice, but without the terrible mirth.
“But she’s a cold one still, and heedless of life or light. I can’t fault your
mother, I suppose. She’s but serving the power she’s sworn to.”

“My mother is not evil!”

“Of course not,” said Sidani. “She’s a good priestess and a
strong empress. Your father chose her well.” As if, thought Estarion, she had a
right to judge. “But she did ill not to warn you that the Sun’s seed is
stronger than mages’ bindings. That it could come to this.”

He looked down at Vanyi. She seemed very small in the wide
bed, very white and still. His heart twisted. “Oh, god and goddess. I could
have killed her.”

“Nonsense!” He jumped at the sharpness in Sidani’s tone.
“She’s a good, strong wench—or she would be if your priests hadn’t meddled with
her cycles. Better for you both if she’d seen to it herself, and not trusted in
someone else’s bindings. Although,” she added, musing, “even that might not
have come to anything, you being what you are. That fire will burn in the void
between the stars.”

“What are you? How do you know so much?”

The bright black eyes slanted toward him and then away.
There was nothing old in them at all, and nothing young. They were beyond age.
“I tell stories. I live a few, maybe. Your grandfather got your father on a
woman proven barren, proclaimed so by mages. He sowed his seed in the dry land,
and it brought forth a bright fruit. She’s no fallow field, this one, nor will
be, now the gates are open.”

Estarion’s hands lowered of themselves to Vanyi’s body,
tracing the paths of life and magic. They ran clean and they ran straight, no
knot of coiled spells beneath the heart. Blood had washed it away.

He began to shake. “Gods. Oh, gods. She’ll be forsworn.”

“Don’t moan.” Sidani gathered together bloodied sheets and
cloths and made a bundle of them. “Someone will have to wash these.”

“And explain them.”

“Never explain,” she said. “You are the emperor. That and no
more is your explanation. But,” she added, “if you insist, then your lady has
had a particularly calamitous onset of her courses. They’re never easy for her,
are they?”

“No,” said Estarion unwillingly. But, “Mages will know as
soon as they see her.”

“Let them. More fools they, for fancying that they could
bridle Sun’s blood.”

He was not afraid of her, not exactly. But as he saw her
standing there like a serving-woman with her armful of bloodied cloths, he knew
suddenly and piercingly that she was more than he had imagined. Vanyi had seen
it: blessed, damnable perception. She had not seen what was in her own body,
not looking for it, not expecting it, and it had betrayed her.

“Go to sleep,” said Sidani, dryly practical as any
grandmother with a stubborn child. “She’ll be sleeping for a while, and when
she wakes she’ll need you there, as strong as you can be. She wanted that baby
too badly to be easy about losing it.”

“But she didn’t even know—”

The glance that raked him was burning cold. “Manchild,” she
said, “go to sleep.”

And, like the infant that she reckoned him, he went. He
sensed no sorcery in it. It simply was.

“A son! A son for the Olenyai!”

The cry rang from the tower of their stronghold, riding the
notes of a horn. So it always was when a son was born alive, unblemished, and
spoken for by the mages. Daughters were neither sung nor celebrated, although
they suffered the same testing, the same speaking of mages, and the same hard
fate if they failed: death, and casting out for the birds to feed on.

“That’s another one for Shajiz,” Marid said, down below in
the court of swords, where he was alone but for his swordbrother. “What does
that make now? Six? Seven?”

“Five,” said Korusan. He was honing his right-hand sword; he
had barely paused for the birthing-call.

Marid shrugged. “Then he’s got two more coming. Remarkable.
Do you remember when he was so behindhand in his duty that they were talking of
forbidding him the women altogether?”

Korusan ran the stone down the bright blade and up again.
“So they were,” he said. His voice had no inflection.

Marid shot him a glance. Here where none could see them but
Olenyai, he went unveiled. The single scar on his cheek was as redly new and no
doubt as itchy in its mending as Korusan’s: he rubbed it, fidgeting as he
always did, for Marid was a restless man. “Some come late to it, that’s all.”

Korusan’s hand stopped. He thought of clasping the sharpened
steel, for the pleasure of the pain. “You have two sons,” he said.

“So will you, when you get to it.”

“I go to the women every night,” said Korusan. “Every cycle
of Brightmoon they name themselves and the men who have gone to them, and the
seed that has sprouted in them. They often name me among the sowers. But never
among the harvest.”

“You’re very young,” said Marid, who to be sure was a whole
year the elder.

“I was doing a man’s duty while you were still a
flute-voiced child.”

“And who was it that I heard last cycle, singing descant
with the girls?”

Korusan’s sword sang into its sheath. There had been a
moment while he raised it, when Marid’s eyes had flickered, his hand twitched
toward his own sheathed blade. But he would not begin battle, if battle must
be. Not against his swordbrother.

Korusan would have liked to be as certain of himself. Olenyai
were loyal to their lords and to one another. It was bred into them. But
Korusan was not Olenyas—not in the blood, and not in the soul.

“I think,” said Korusan. “I fear . . .”

He could not say it, even to Marid, who was as close to him
as any living thing could be.

Nor would Marid set it in words for him. He was blind, was
Marid, and deaf to what he did not wish to hear. “Shajiz was one-and-twenty
when his first son was conceived; and he had been going to the women since he
was twelve years old. Early manhood isn’t early fatherhood, brother.”